Office 2007 training for teachers – a world first

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Being Smarter Ltd is proud to annouce today a brand new online course from its training video production company – The 8.45 Club.

Office 2007 training for teachers is a course which has been written and devised by teacher training experts over the last six months. It’s been presented and produced by The 8.45 Club team, led by Mark Copeman. Never before has an online course for Microsoft’s Office 2007 ever been written by teachers for teachers, using their language and giving examples pertinent to their working day.

It’s been devised in response to a constant need for schools to reduce costs and an ongoing requirement for teaching staff to work smarter by getting the most out of the software they use on a day to day basis.

Mark Copeman, course producer said,

[quote] “In our research, teachers are in two camps – they’re either upgrading from Office 2003 and have to come to terms with a completely different ribbon toolbar layout in Office 2007 or they’re still using Office 2003, and have never been properly trained on how to get the most from the sofware. It amazes me how many people still go about things the long way. We’ve set about trying to change people’s bad habits. ” [/quote]

The course is made up of 40+ bite-sized video modules, totalling five hours of learning. Teachers can dip in and out to suit them – learning when they need to and not being limited to when a trainer is in a classroom after school. It is structured so that staff can learn at the pace they want to, or jump straight to a particular topic.

“We’ve already got our first 500 teachers signed up to use the course – and currently, the most popular module is on shortcuts” said Mark. “The really great thing about the course website, is that users can track the time they spend learning and submit a certificate towards their Continuous Professional Development time for that school year.”

The course has already won a warm response from its users.

[quote]”What I am used to having is someone talking at me for half an hour. By the time you come to actually come to USE  the software, you have forgotten everything and lost any bit of paper you wrote on or were given. This is the right way to learn!” [/quote]

Anna Deacon, Head of Department at a school in Gloucestershire, UK

This online video course  is available through the UK’s Training and Development Agency for Schools CPD database. You can also watch a sample module and apply for volume discounts at the course website – Office 2007 training for teachers.

ENDS.

Why it’s been quiet

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Not much going on at Being Smarter at the moment you may be thinking in that the blog has been quiet for a month. In truth we’ve been busy delivering for clients and launching courses for partners!

Whilst that’s all been going on, we’ve also been tweaking the business too and will be shifting our focus ever to slightly over the coming weeks…

We’ve got some great ideas to help your business with both free and paid for services and are looking forward to getting our messages out there.

Watch this space…

How to start a business with no money

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We’re proud to announce our next online training course with Ed Dale called Starting from Scratch, which teaches you how to start a business with no money. This article gives you our thinking behind it.

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I’ve been in this online industry full time for about two years now and let me tell you one thing – it’s certainly not easy. It takes hours and hours of effort to be successful and so much of it is completely wasted, because you never know which hours are going to pay back.

I talk to a lot of people who are really interested in going it alone either online or in the ‘real world’ and the most common question is always how do you start a business with no money? People either have time or resources available to them and more often than not, it’s just time and very little capital. But that’s OK and it’s certainly not a reason not to start a business.

One of my mentors is a guy called Ed Dale. You may have heard of him – he runs a programme called The Thirty Day Challenge, which teaches you how to make your first $1 online. He is passionate about online marketing but he’s equally as passionate about helping people to start a business with no money. He calls his methodology ‘starting from scratch and has done it himself many times. I’ve enjoyed learning from him because he talks sense.

He has given me (at least) 5 valuable pieces of advice, which I’d like to share with you when it comes to starting from scratch in the online space.

  1. Don’t give up your day job – Giving up the day job with a business plan (a what?!) and a standing start is guaranteed to see your savings disappear quickly. There’s a better way.  Spend the bare minimum on your day job, bring in your salary and then spend every other waking hour preparing foryour next move.
  2. Today’s economic climate can be an advantage – 10 years ago, online marketing was easy. Cost per click was cheap and few people were in the online business. Today it’s much harder to succeed, yet the tools make your life easier if you know how to use them. You just need a laser guided focus and a will to succeed.
  3. You need to build a bank of cash – When you start a business with no money, accept it isn’t going to be straight forward – you need to build a small bank of cash which can then go onto fund the bare essential tools you need to invest in, such as domain names and webhosting. There are a number of strategies for doing this whilst you’re still doing #1.
  4. There is no excuse not to research your market – So many people start their business, create a product and then spend months trying to sell it without ever considering if there’s a market for it. With the Google Keyword tool and other tools such as Market Samurai, there is no excuse not to find out about the market place before you start… again making it so much easier to get the business off the ground without funding.
  5. It’s not for everyone – Accept that when you start a business with no money it’s a huge uphill struggle. Unless you’re passionate about what you do, have the support of your family and friends, then you’re always going to struggle…

If you want to know more about how to start a business with no money, Ed’s course with The 8.45 Club is now live and will teach you how to start from scratch in the online marketing world. Click the link to see the first module for free! It’s a tried and tested philosophy as you’ll see from the two case studies within the course.

Being Smarter moves up a gear

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The first couple of months of 2010 have flown by. Being Smarter is delighted to announce five new clients since Xmas, a Spanish organisation, two companies in the FTSE 250, a new content partner here in the UK and one in Australia.

After a successful trip to Sydney and Melbourne last month, our partnership with Ed Dale, one of the world’s most prominent Internet Marketers goes from strength to strength as we launch the second of five courses next week under the Ed-ucationonline.com brand. If you’ve always wanted to know how to ‘Start from scratch’ in the Internet marketing space – watch out for 11 modules of pure delight from next week.

Our partnership with Kaplan Eduneering continues to grow, with another new course addressing local US government going live at the end of April.

Targets to Prospects, a service we developed by popular request, after we used it to target individuals successfully for a year was launched in January, and we’ve successfully delivered five installations in the last month. We’ll let you know the results from these first customers very soon. We’ve also added new functionality which we’re rather proud of…

Innovation continues too as we’ve also successfully delivered a ‘personalised video‘ project for one of the clients above… Imagine a video which appears to be built uniquely for a company or individual? Imagine watching a story unfold and seeing your logo / name / statement appear within it, seamlessly… you’d be impressed wouldn’t you? Well imagine no longer. Next time you want to run a campaign targeting a known group of targets, why not consider Targets to Prospects?

Exciting times – with more to come we hope.

Leading customer service trainers partner with The 8.45 Club

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Today, we are proud to announce that after an extensive search, Mary Gober International (MGI), a world-leading customer service training organisation has selected The 8.45 Club (part of the Being Smarter group of companies) to provide custom ‘sustainability training’ to its customers.

For some time, MGI, like many training organisations used traditional methods to reinforce training messages taught during face to face during a campaign.

“MGI has been looking for new, cost-effective and innovative ways to enable organisations to embed and sustain skills learnt on our Seminars – to complement the sustainability activities we currently use” said Shona Cooper, Managing Director, MGI. “We are delighted to be partnering with The 8.45 Club to offer engaging, practical video training, delivered to inboxes in bite-sized chunks over weeks or months as a way of reinforcing our face to face Seminars.”

In addition to providing bespoke learning for its clients, The 8.45 Club also plan to be producing a public courses throughout 2010 in conjunction with the Mary Gober team.

Shona Cooper added, “One of the initiatives we will undertake together is to host an innovation session with learning professionals to show examples and discuss the potential of this bite-sized video training. From there we are looking to trial these techniques with some launch customers. It’s an exciting time in MGI’s evolution.”

Mark Copeman, founder of The 8.45 Club said, “We’re delighted to be working with Shona and the team at Mary Gober International. After seeing their trainers in action, it became clear to us that their methodology naturally lends itself to video training, because what they do is so visual and so engaging. We hope that this partnership will enable more and more customers to take advantage of their excellent coaching and that lessons taught will now be reinforced even more successfully.”

If you are interested in learning more about the innovation session Shona discusses above, please contact us using the link at the top of the page.

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The 8.45 Club partners with Kaplan Eduneering

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Being Smarter Ltd is delighted to announce that its 8.45 Club venture has partnered with Kaplan Eduneering (NJ, USA) owned by The Washington Post.

Kaplan Eduneering will be adding our 8.45 Club style of learning to its already innovative portfolio of elearning capabilities designed for its corporate clients. The partnership has already delivered three video courses on Building Sustainable businesses, featuring Jeffrey Hollender, founder of Seventh Generation, Business Ethics training and an Instructional design course. All feature subject matter experts from the Kaplan stable.

Whilst these are private, subscription only courses – you can see screenshots below… (click for larger image).

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Over the coming months we will be releasing new, engaging courses together, delivering short, practical and to the point videos, delivered by expert presenters. Knowledge workers can be safe in the knowledge they will still be back at desks for 9.00.

Mark Copeman, founder of The 8.45 Club said, “We are delighted Kaplan Eduneering found our service – they are training experts, have been delivering training to 100’s of corporate clients for many years, yet they still see the value in what The 8.45 Club style of training can deliver. We are looking forward to continuing with our vision for innovation and providing Kaplan with a solution to the problem of people not having time to learn any more.”

Kent Malmros, director Business Development, Kaplan Eduneering said, “Our mission at Kaplan EduNeering is to help companies promote behavior change through effective online training and knowledge management. That means we’re always looking to provide clients with the best adult learning tools and The 8.45 Club has developed one.

They have blended traditional news delivery and sound instructional design to create a compelling new methodology for delivering knowledge. As partners with The 8.45 Club, Kaplan EduNeering passes this progressive new approach on to its clients and has the privilege of working with them to stay at the fore of training’s evolution.”

The partner page can be found here.

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Personnel Today features The 8.45 Club

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It’s always a good feeling when the industry trade press feature one of your innovations. Lesley Everett’s Walking Tall personal branding course has been featured today in PersonnelToday.com.

One of our esteemed partners and a true expert in her field, Lesley Everett commented…

“In the current climate, providing people the ability to access highly effective, but low cost training solutions has never been more important. Our personal branding modules launched on the 8.45 Club will show subscribers how to develop their personal brand in order to develop executive presence, confidence and marketability.

Lesley is one of a number of partners The 8.45 Club works with to develop courses for business audiences. If you are a true subject matter expert with a story to tell and an audience who wants to hear it – why not consider using this virtual presenter format as a way of reaching untapped audiences as well as generating an additional source of income… while you sleep.

Use the contact us link at the top of the page to request a call.